Clearly Machado’s mature style involves a mockery of this complacent, cynical advisor and his passive, all too obedient client. But then we think perhaps the father is a satirist himself, mocking the world he lives in, and trying to provoke his son into the very thinking he says he should avoid. Does he really need to compliment him on his mental vacuity? And what about the son? Could he be playing a waiting game, aghast at his father’s nonsense but not sure what to do? What if all three of these interpretative possibilities are in play? I doubt whether many of us can juggle them all at once, but there is nothing in the story that will allow us finally to choose among them. And the readings I have just suggested do not even include the one that is hiding in plain sight: the father may be sincere and also quite right. His views and the world he evokes are regrettable affairs, but since when did regret do away with the truth?

Machado’s stories—delicate, funny, elusive, never bitter, often near to unacknowledged horrors—teach us how to read: how to read the stories themselves and how to read their often too complacent world, perhaps even more subtly than his novels teach their related lessons. We might think, in conclusion, of the masterpiece called “Midnight Mass” (1894), which begins with the voice of a man saying, “I’ve never quite understood a conversation I had with a lady many years ago, when I was seventeen and she was thirty.” We think we already know this story, simply by learning the sexes and ages in question. In one sense we do. It is all about mutual desire and embarrassment and missed implications. But then we remember that the narrator is saying he doesn’t understand it even now, and we wonder if we really are wiser than he is. What does it mean when nothing happens, and that same nothing lingers unforgettably in your life?

Michael Wood

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s humble beginnings, and yet he, apparently, thought his own life to be of little interest and insisted that what counted was his work. Of course, in general terms, he’s right, but, given his evolution from a poorly educated child of impoverished parents to Brazil’s greatest writer and pillar of the establishment, a brief biographical note would not seem out of place. His paternal grandparents were mulattos and freed slaves. His father, also a mulatto, was a painter and decorator, his mother a washerwoman, a white Portuguese immigrant from the Azores. Both parents, however, could read and write, which was not common among working-class people at the time.